Nutritional researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that what we eat directly determines genetic expression and can predict chronic disease risk, rate of aging, quality of life and mortality. A diet predominated by processed foods and laden with sugars, hydrogenated fats and refined carbohydrates has been shown to promote metabolic oxidation, systemic inflammation and lowered immune response that opens the door for heart disease, diabetes, dementia, stroke and many forms of cancer. A new research body evaluates precise risk factors in the development of several chronic illnesses and premature death.

A research team studying the dietary habits of British adults has published the results of a study in The American Journal of Medicine that shows how following a Western-style diet consisting of fried and sweet foods, processed and red meats, refined grains, and high-fat dairy products can reduce a person’s likelihood of achieving older age in good health and with higher functionality. Scientists assessed dietary habits in midlife, using dietary patterns and adherence to the industry standard Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI).

The lead study author, Dr. Tasnime Akbaraly noted “The impact of diet on specific age-related diseases has been studied extensively, but few investigations have adopted a more holistic approach to determine the association of diet with overall health at older ages.” Past studies have shown that following the AHEI standards can double the odds of reversing metabolic syndrome, a condition known to be a strong predictor of heart disease and mortality, and can identify factors known to prevent premature death while promoting ideal aging.

The research team followed 3,775 men and 1,575 women with an average age of 51 years between 1985 and 2009. After analyzing records from hospital visits and the results of screenings every five years, the team identified mortality and chronic diseases among participants. Over the course of the study, only 4 percent of the participants exhibited markers considered to represent ideal aging. Researchers determined that low adherence to the AHEI increased overall risk of cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular death.

Following a Western-style diet consisting of fried and sweet foods, processed and red meats, refined grains, and high-fat dairy products significantly lowered chances for ideal aging. Dr. Akbaraly concluded “We showed that following specific dietary recommendations such as the one provided by the AHEI may be useful in reducing the risk of unhealthy aging, while avoidance of the ‘Western-type foods’ might actually improve the possibility of achieving older ages free of chronic diseases and remaining highly functional.” Although not specifically mentioned, following a Mediterranean style diet provides AHEI compliance and has repeatedly been shown to lower risk of chronic disease and extend lifespan.

Metabolic syndrome refers to a related group of conditions including increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist and abnormal cholesterol levels that dramatically increase the risk of developing heart disease, stroke and diabetes, among a host of other serious chronic diseases. Extensive research has identified a number of natural foods and aggressive lifestyle changes that can delay or even prevent the development of serious health problems.

Researchers from the University of Michigan have presented the result of their work to the Experimental Biology Conference in Boston that shows how consuming grapes may help protect against organ damage associated with the progression of metabolic syndrome. The scientists explain that natural components found in grapes, known as polyphenols, are thought to be responsible for the beneficial effects.

The team has found that regular consumption of a variety of different colored grapes can directly impact the development of metabolic syndrome, even when consumed as part of a high fat, American-style diet followed by millions across the country. Using a mouse model designed to simulate human metabolism, researchers examined the effect of feeding a high fat diet supplemented with a freeze-dried grape powder extract to two test groups, with one isolated as an unsupplemented control group for a period of 90 days.

The results showed that three months of a grape-enriched diet significantly reduced inflammatory markers throughout the body, but most significantly in the liver and in abdominal fat tissue. Grape consumption in the supplemented group also reduced liver, kidney and abdominal fat weight, and increased markers of antioxidant defense, particularly in the liver and kidneys. Lead study investigator, Dr. Mitchell Seymour commented “Our study suggests that a grape-enriched diet may play a critical role in protecting against metabolic syndrome and the toll it takes on the body and its organs.”

Consuming grapes and grape seed extract has been shown to improve levels of cognition and lower the risk of developing dementia in past studies, and now may be used as a critical component in the fight against metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Dr. Seymour concluded “Both inflammation and oxidative stress play a role in cardiovascular disease progression and organ dysfunction in type 2 diabetes. Grape intake impacted both of these components in several tissues which is a very promising finding.” Nutrition scientists recommend consuming several servings of grapes each week or supplementing with a standardized extract (150 to 250 mg daily) to fight the risk of developing metabolic syndrome and lower the risk of organ damage.

The Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) recently published preliminary data from its annual review of bee colony declines in the U.S., and the findings from this report are mind-boggling. According to the latest survey results, an astounding 31.3 percent, or roughly one-third, of all managed bee colonies in the U.S. were wiped out during the most recent 2012/2013 winter season, a rate that represents a 42 percent increase compared to the number of colonies lost during the previous 2011/2012 winter season.

According to BIP, which works in collaboration with both the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), U.S. beekeepers on average lost more than 45 percent of their colonies during the 2012/2013 winter season, a 78.2 percent jump in losses over the previous season. And overall, more than 70 percent of respondents, most of whom were backyard beekeepers, experienced losses beyond the 15 percent “acceptable” threshold, illustrating a monumental problem not only for bee survival but also for the American food supply.

Since 2006, total bee colony losses have hovered around 30 percent, sometimes a little higher and sometimes a little lower. And the situation was believed by some to be improving when the overall percentage of colony losses declined sharply during the 2011/2012 winter season by almost 10 percent. But now that the death toll has jumped once again beyond the 30 percent mark, many are worried that this year-after-year compounded increase will very soon make it impossible for grow enough food.

“We’re getting closer and closer to the point where we don’t have enough bees in this country to meet pollination demands,” says Dennis vanEngelstorp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland who led the survey. “If we want to grow fruits and nuts and berries, this is important. One in every three bites [of food consumed in the U.S.] is directly or indirectly pollinated by bees.”

Colony Collapse Disorder no longer a primary cause of bee losses – bees are just dying

In previous years, a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, was believed to be the primary cause of bee losses around the world. The general consensus is that bees affected by CCD simply disappear from their hives for no apparent reason. According to the USDA, CCD-stricken hives typically still have a queen, but experience anywhere from a 30 to 90 percent loss on adult worker bees, whose bodies are never found.

CCD is still highly problematic today, no doubt. But experts increasingly say it is no longer the primary cause of bee losses that it was once believed to be. In Western Europe, for instance, there have been very few documented cases of true CCD, and yet honeybee losses there have remained high just as they have in many other parts of the world, which points to other causes.

“Even if CCD went away, we’d still have tremendous losses,” entomologist Diana Cox-Foster from Pennsylvania State University (PSU) is quoted as saying by Wired.com about the epidemic. “CCD losses are like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The system has many other issues.”

Neonicotinoids are also highly problematic, but so are the hundreds of other pesticides being found in honeybee hives

So what else is causing bees to die? As many have reported recently, the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides on commercial food crops is also to blame. Neonicotinoids are so dangerous, in fact, that the European Union recently banned them, at least for two years, pending further safety studies. EU officials determined earlier in the year that this particular class of chemicals poisons bees at an alarming rate and ultimately leads to their untimely deaths, en masse.

And yet at the same time, there are hundreds of other chemicals used in conventional agriculture that are also responsible for poisoning bees, admit experts. Samples of wax taken from various hives have demonstrated high levels of all sorts of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides – one study published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE back in 2010 found more than 120 different types of crop chemicals in the wax and pollen collected from hundreds of different hive samples.

“I worry that the neonicotinoid attention is distracting from the other pesticides that have clear effects, and might even have stronger effects,” says vanEngelstorp. “Things like fungicides are completely unregulated for bees. I think we need to keep the pesticide investigation broader.”

Another major factor affecting bees includes monoculture crop systems that deprive bees of the diversity of plants they need for healthy survival and foraging. Many of these monoculture systems are also planted with genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), which have been shown to damage the gastrointestinal tracts of bees and make them more prone to viruses and disease.

The Supreme Court’s contemptible decision last year to ignore every element of constitutional intent by declaring Obamacare a legitimate “tax” on American taxpayers has created a laundry list of new responsibilities for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), according to reports. As the enforcement arm of this gargantuan federal sick care scam, the IRS will reportedly have to administer and manage an extortionate 47 Obamacare tax provisions starting next year, for which the entity will require billions of dollars in new funding.

Beginning on January 1, 2014, all “nonexempt individuals” living in the United States will allegedly be required to maintain what the federal government has decorously termed “minimum essential coverage” under Obamacare. Those who do not maintain such coverage will be expected to pay a so-called “shared responsibility payment” on their federal income tax return – in reality, this absurd “payment” is nothing more than a coercive fine for non-compliance with the Obamacare mandate.

But who is going to make sure that every single eligible taxpayer in the country either maintains Obamacare coverage or pays the fine? Well, that would be the IRS, according to CNBC. Not only this, but the IRS will also have to figure out how to distribute roughly 18 million Obamacare subsidies to American taxpayers who earn less than $45,000 per year in taxable income, an enormous undertaking that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman says will require $13.1 billion just for the 2014 fiscal year.

“The impact of the IRS on health care reform is huge,” says Paul Hamburger, a partner and employee benefits lawyer at Proskauer Rose LLP, as quoted by CNBC. “Other agencies like Social Security will be checking for mistakes, but the IRS is the key enforcer. It’s also going to help manage who might get health care.”

Good news: IRS technically has no power to enforce penalties for not purchasing health insurance

An interesting fact that few people are aware of, however, is that the so-called Affordable Care Act does not actually spell out how the IRS can enforce the collection of penalties for those individuals that choose not to abide by the unconstitutional law’s insurance mandate. According to reports, the IRS will surely ask for the money, but there exist no civil or criminal penalties for those who refuse to pay it, which is good news for the millions of Americans who decide to take control of their own health destinies.

“The ACA (Affordable Care Act) bars the IRS from bringing a criminal enforcement case against someone who refuses to pay the non-insurance penalty,” explains Forbes. “And it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for it to enforce a tax lien.”

Obamacare’s passage illegal because legislation did not originate in House of Representatives

Another factor in this whole Obamacare debacle is the reality that the bill itself did not originate in the House of Representatives as required by law, which means it is not technically valid or enforceable.

YourHoustonNews.com explains that, by law, any new law that extracts money from taxpayers must originate in the House – the Affordable Care Act originated in the Senate. Beyond this, many have also correctly pointed out that there is no reasonable or logical way for Obamacare to be considered a legitimate tax.

“If the mandate’s penalty is a tax, it is not a tax on income, but on disobedience,” wrote one insightful and fully aware commenter on a CNBC article discussing this new breed of tyranny. “If taxes can be used to compel the individual to obey government dictums, by expropriating their private property, then the power to tax is all-powerful, and all other rights promised by the Constitution are meaningless.”

An undated article discussing the invention of genetically-modified (GM) human beings that was published by the U.K.’s DailyMail at least 10 years ago is gaining fresh attention from the online community these days. And even though the heinous practice, which is known as cytoplasmic transfer, is technically illegal in the U.S., the current regulatory framework offers little in the way of enforcement capacity against those that breach this moratorium.

Because the DailyMail article is not dated, some have mistakenly taken it to be current, and have adopted the position that GM babies may potentially become the next big thing in reproductive medicine. But it appears as though this is not actually the case, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apparently banned this form of genetic manipulation back in the early 2000s after declaring it to be under its regulatory jurisdiction.

According to the original DailyMail article, Jacques Cohen, a former employee at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine & Science of Saint Barnabas in New Jersey, came up with a way to blend the genes of multiple mothers into a single egg that can then be fertilized with sperm from a male. The end product is a child with a genetic blueprint from three different parents, a process of human manipulation known as “germline” alteration.

This unscrupulous discovery, which only further taints the natural order of life with man-made genetic modifications, reportedly led to the development of at least 15 GM babies at that time, which are presumably still alive and now progressing through their adolescent years. And according to the original report, any children born to these GM individuals will also bear these modified GM traits, as they are inherently passed down from generation to generation.

“The fact that the children have inherited the extra genes and incorporated them into their ‘germline’ means that they will, in turn, be able to pass them on to their own offspring,” wrote Michael Hanlon for the Daily Mail back at that time. “Altering the human germline – in effect tinkering with the very make-up of our species – is a technique shunned by the vast majority of the world’s scientists.”

GM babies are a ‘biological product,’ which puts them under FDA jurisdiction

This is admittedly a very frightening development, as it has the potential to unleash untold horrors on the human genome. But what is not clear from the original DailyMail article is when it was actually written, and if the procedure is still taking place today. As explained in a later paper published by the Washington Monthly in 2002, it appears as though GM babies did not necessarily take off as some believe, and this is due to FDA prohibitions.

“Since 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has argued that genetically manipulated embryos are a ‘biological product,’ and therefore subject to regulation, just like medical devices and drugs,” wrote Shannon Brownlee for the Washington Monthly. “FDA sent warning letters to six fertility centers threatening ‘enforcement action,’ and asserting its regulatory power over ‘therapy involving the transfer of genetic material by means other than the union of [sperm and egg]’.”

But some of the biotechnologists working in the field have since challenged the FDA’s authority on the matter, arguing that the agency’s perceived dominance is “a stretch.” Does this mean that GM babies will soon become mainstream? It is difficult to say, but at this time, there does not appear to be any clinics in the U.S. actively performing such procedures in violation of the FDA’s orders.

This may be controversial. Since high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has been pointed out as a leading cause of fatty liver, obesity, and other bad health issues, many assume the same is true for consuming fruits.

Yes, fruits contain fructose. But that fructose is in much smaller quantities than HFCS. Dr. Mark Hyman refers to the massive amounts of HFCS in processed foods and beverages as pharmacological, or intensely condensed and isolated or extracted from it’s food source. (Source below)

All the doctors sourced below agree that fructose in excess gets converted mostly to triglyceride fats instead of glucose for energy. Even table sugar (sucrose) gets converted to glucose more efficiently and without clogging up the liver.

The sudden surge in obesity and type-2 diabetes began with the introduction of HFCS into processed foods and beverages. Our livers don’t convert pharmacological fructose doses into energy the way it can sucrose. Even IV pharmacological glucose can be beneficial under dire circumstances without damaging the liver.

Fruits in their natural solid forms contain much smaller amounts of fructose than processed HFCS. Their fructose is combined with other nutrients and fibers. So they are digested more slowly and can be assimilated without overdosing on fructose. This keeps the liver from being overwhelmed by a massive dose of fructose.

Making HFSC matters worse, almost all corn is GMO. And the process of converting corn that’s already compromised with GMOs produces mercury. So you get a troublesome gene transfer virus with your mercury. If the massive fructose doesn’t kill your liver, the GMO and mercury may finish the job.

Caveats: Eating the whole fruit is advised because juices, especially from concentrates, multiply the amount of fructose without the fiber that helps slow its digestion and keep your liver from being overwhelmed. Also, most fruits are exposed to toxic chemical interventions during cultivation and/or ripening.

With all that said, here are six edible fruits that will provide stable energy safely.

(1) Apples are highly regarded for several reasons. They are hardy and don’t spoil quickly unrefrigerated. They are higher in fiber than most other fruits as well, and they contain several other basic nutrients.

Some nutritional experts point out that the energy from apples sticks around a little longer than most other fruits. Conventionally produced apples rank high in the “dirty dozen” list of sprayed produce. So stick with organic.

(2) Bananas boost energy with a good amount of potassium, which is good for maintaining membrane potential, a stimulus response that enables muscles to contract. Very important for the heart. Organic is better, but not as vital as it is for apples. Bananas are in the “clean 15” list.

(3) Strawberries provide an excellent energy boost too. But the most toxic pesticides are used on them. They have to be organic.

(4) Pineapples made the “clean 15” list, and they can give you a good energy boost. Just try to purchase Mexican pineapples to avoid playing GMO roulette with Costa Rican and Hawaiian pineapples.

Not all Hawaiian and Costa Rican pineapples are GMO, but there are enough to contaminate non-GMO or organic pineapples.

(5) Papaya can give you and energy boost and improve your digestion if you eat the seeds, but the same regional GMO advice for pineapples applies to papaya.

(6) Oranges provide a lot of energy and vitamin C. Don’t buy and consume juices, however, especially those generated from concentrates. It’s best to eat the complete wedges from a freshly peeled orange.

Rarely known outside traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), lei gong teng or “thunder god vine” is stunning Western researchers with its ability to stop cancer in its tracks – in as little as forty days. Used for its health enhancing qualities for more than 2,000 years in China, the West is beginning to recognize the astounding benefits of the vine for treating cancer, giving new hope to those who suffer from the most deadly forms of the disease.

Thunder god vine compound swiftly conquers cancer

Lei gong teng (Tripterygium wilfordii) is native to China, Japan and Korea where it has long been valued for its distinct anti-inflammatory, immunosuppressive and anti-cancer properties. Supplying ample amounts of the active compound triptolide, the herb demonstrates substantial success in eradicating cancerous tumors.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Masonic Cancer Center discovered that mice treated with triptolide for 40 days showed no further incidence of tumors, even after ceasing treatment. Ashok Saluja, vice chairman of research and the study’s leader, told Bloomberg, “You could see every day you looked at those mice, the tumor was decreasing and decreasing, and then just gone.”

Scientists at John Hopkins School of Medicine also found extracts of lei gong teng to be effective in eliminating cancerous tumors. Jun O. Liu, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences at Johns Hopkins, notes:

“… triptolide has been shown to block the growth of all 60 U.S. National Cancer Institute cell lines at very low doses, and even causes some of those cell lines to die.”

Apparently, the compound impedes the manufacture of new RNA, thereby curbing cancerous proliferation in mice. These findings are laying the foundation for human clinical trials in the near future.

Triptolide has been shown to inhibit colorectal, pancreatic and ovarian cancers, among others. Rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis and lupus respond to lei gong teng as well.

Since the herb can cause serious side effects, including loss of bone density, headache and infertility, it is important to consult a qualified TCM practitioner before use.

The dark side of scientific research

Even though emerging research regarding the thunder god vine is encouraging, financial gain is still the underlying motivating factor. Anthony Gucciardi of Natural Society aptly observes:

“While it is great news that this study is bringing the beneficial effects of inexpensive and near-free plant compounds to light, the bad news is that the individuals responsible for the research are actually looking to create a pharmaceutical drug from the essential component triptolide. A drug that will seek FDA approval and ultimately be patented, nutritionally ruined, and sold for exorbitant amounts of cash. Instead, just get your hands on some thunder god vine for yourself.”